King Arthur – Blood and Porridge

September 13, 2025September 13, 2025

Farewell to the king

© Penguin Books

I’ve just finished Excalibur (1997), the third and final book in the Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell’s take on the King Arthur legend. Reading it was a bittersweet experience. On one hand, I was pleased it lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors in the trilogy, The Winter King (1995) and Enemy of God (1996). On the other, I felt almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.

Still, not wanting to read the final book in the trilogy because you don’t want bad things to happen to its characters – that must show how captivating Cornwell’s Warlord books are. And besides, as they say, all good things come to an end.

Once again, the story is narrated by Derfel, an elderly, one-handed Christian monk. He’s writing down – with his remaining hand, obviously – the details of Arthur’s life as it unfolded in post-Roman, fifth-and-sixth-century Britain, a time when the island and its Briton inhabitants were besieged by invading, land-hungry Saxons. Derfel knows these details because despite being Christian and monkish now, he was in his youth (and, in Excalibur, his middle age) a pagan and one of Arthur’s warlords. He’s recording the story at the request of Queen Igraine, who’s too young to have known Arthur but is besotted with his legend. Derfel unhappily suspects that, when he’s finished, the queen will change the unromantic bits of his saga to make it more legend-friendly. “Tales of men fighting can get very boring after a while,” she scolds the old monk, “and a love story makes it all a lot more interesting.”

Excalibur joins the dots and tells us how Derfel went from being a powerful pagan warrior to being a humble Christian monk in a monastery run by the contemptible Bishop Sansum – a recurring character in the trilogy, who constantly schemed and shit-stirred against Arthur and, in his furtive, cowardly way, tried to engineer his downfall. We also learn how Derfel lost his hand. And, all credit to Cornwell’s ingenious storyline, he certainly doesn’t lose it in any way I’d expected.

And we find out the fates of the characters who were still standing at the end of the second book. We learn what happened to the wily and enigmatic druid Merlin; to King Cuneglas of Powys whom, alone among Britain’s powerful kings, Arthur could depend upon as an ally; and to Derfel’s fellow warriors, such as the Christian Galahad, and the Numidian Sagramor, and the coarse but likable Culhwch. Also, with an ache, Derfel recalls what became of his partner Ceinwyn. In this final volume, she has to endure a lot.

Of course, we get the final chapters in the life of Arthur himself. At one point, Derfel sums up the thanklessness of Arthur’s task: “If only Arthur had remained in power, men say, then the Saxons would still be paying us tribute and Britain would stretch from sea to sea, but when Britain did have Arthur it just grumbled about him. When he gave folk what they wanted, they complained because it was not enough. The Christians attacked him for favouring the pagans, the pagans attacked him for tolerating the Christians, and the Kings… were jealous of him… Besides, Arthur did not let anyone down. Britain let itself down. Britain let the Saxons creep back, Britain squabbled among itself and then Britain whined that it was all Arthur’s fault. Arthur, who had given them victory!”

From wikimedia.org

No wonder that in Excalibur, after Arthur manages to beat off the Saxons, he retires from his role as the Lord Protector of the kingdom of Dumnonia and becomes ‘a mere landowner living in the peaceful countryside with no worries other than the health of his livestock and the state of his crops…’ He also, amusingly, tries to learn how to be a blacksmith, but he’s not very good at it. When Derfel sees him working on ‘a shapeless piece of iron that he claimed was a shoe-plate for one of his horses’, it’s clear the iron is a metaphor for his futile attempts to fashion a unified and harmonious Britain out of its quarrelling kingdoms.

At the same time, the book provides endings for the remaining villains of the trilogy. These include Arthur’s treacherous wife Guinevere, who at the end of the Enemy of God had joined forces with the dastardly Lancelot – the young Queen Igraine was dismayed to learn from Derfel that Guinevere and Lancelot were definitely not the noble characters of legend. There’s also Arthur’s cruel and potentially despotic nephew Mordred whom, despite everyone’s misgivings, Arthur feels honour-bound to give the throne of Dumnonia to when Mordred reaches manhood, thanks to an oath sworn to Mordred’s grandfather Uther Pendragon. There are the Saxon kings Aelle and Cerdic, whose forces are rapidly encroaching on the Britons’ western strongholds. And perhaps most fearsome of all, there’s the priestess Nimue, once a childhood friend of Derfel and a protegee of Merlin, who in Excalibur’s final pages has transformed into the leader of a fanatical pagan force that’s as much of a threat to the heroes as Mordred and the Saxons.

Like all good writers, though, Cornwell doesn’t paint his characters as being simply good or evil. They’re often nuanced. Indeed, in Excalibur, a few people we’d written off as bad guys – or bad girls – achieve some redemption for themselves.

While the cast of Excalibur is mostly familiar from the previous two books, we get a couple of new characters too. We’re introduced to the mystical bard Taliesin, who is something of a surrogate figure for Merlin – Merlin is absent from much of the book and it’s only near the end that we discover the tragic reason why. Taliesin professes to be merely an observer, someone who records and later tells the stories that happen to other people. At one point he informs Derfel, “It does not matter to me, Lord, whether you live or die for I am the singer and you are my song…” Yet he becomes proactive and saves the day on one important occasion. A less welcome surrogate is Argante, a young pagan princess Arthur marries as a replacement for the disgraced Guinevere. He has no interest in her but feels, lamely, that ‘a man should be married’. Arthur’s lack of enthusiasm is soon reciprocated by the ambitious but bitter Argante, and she throws her lot in with Mordred.

Cornwell also drops Sir Gawain into the mix, as he did with Tristan and Isolde in Enemy of God, though Gawain’s appearance is even briefer than theirs was and it ends no more happily. Here, poor Gawain certainly doesn’t get to meet a Green Knight and go off on a quest of his own.

From wikipedia.org / oldbookart.com

The plot of Enemy of God hinged around three events and, similarly, that of Excalibur can be divided into three main episodes. Firstly, Merlin and Nimue attempt to summon back the old pagan gods and restore Britain to its former greatness. This involves using the 13 ‘Treasures of Britain’ that they spent the previous two books retrieving – the Treasures include Arthur’s sword Excalibur – in an elaborate ceremony. It also involves setting the summit of a hill called Mai Dun spectacularly on fire at Samain, the pagan predecessor to Halloween. Secondly, the Britons engage in a long, desperate struggle against Aelle and Cerdic, whose allied forces have launched an assault on Dumnonia. And lastly, there’s the final reckoning with the armies of Mordred and Nimue. Mordred is intent on killing Arthur and his young son Gwydre, who has a claim on Dumnonia’s throne. Nimue is intent on reclaiming Excalibur as a Treasure of Britain and making another attempt to bring back the ancient gods.

Enemy of God painted Christianity in a negative light – it concluded with a bloody revolt against Arthur by the Christians of Dumnonia, which Lancelot had fomented. But in Excalibur the pagans come off badly too. The ceremony that Merlin conducts on Mai Dun to summon the gods reveals a dark and hitherto-unseen side to his nature. And by the book’s end, Nimue, who early in the trilogy had been portrayed as a heroine and even as a possible love-interest for Derfel, has degenerated into a crazed and bloodthirsty monster.

Regarding the magical powers that Merlin, Nimue, the other druids and the Saxons’ wizards claim to have, Cornwell continues the policy he established in the first two books – he keeps it ambiguous. The people of the time certainly believe in it. Magic is as much a part of life for them as warfare, court intrigue and the weather. Modern-day readers are allowed to read between the lines and interpret some of that magic as fakery – its practitioners have no qualms about resorting to crafty conjuring tricks. The rest of it can be attributed to coincidence. However, in Excalibur, you’re forced to explain a lot of allegedly magic-inspired happenings – dream-prophecies, curses, enchantments – as coincidences. You begin to wonder if, in the world Cornwell has created here, there might be substance in what Merlin and Nimue claim they can do.

Elsewhere, Cornwell’s description of fifth-and-sixth-century fighting is as gripping as ever. It’s maybe even more gripping than in Excalibur’s two predecessors. The central episode, wherein we get a Saxon invasion, a desperate flight and then a siege, and finally the Battle of Mynydd Baddon and its aftermath, lasts a good 140 pages and is enthralling from start to finish. The climactic Battle of Camlann is on a much smaller scale but, because you know it’s Arthur’s last stand, it feels no less intense.

And despite the sadness that increasingly permeates the book, things are still leavened by humour. Merlin, as ever, gets the wittiest lines. Early on, he says about Arthur: “…he is a halfwit. Think about it! Lancelot alive, Mordred alive, Cerdic alive and Guinevere alive! If a soul wants to live forever in this world it seems like a very good idea to become an enemy of Arthur.”

So, that’s Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy over for me. At least I can console myself with the thought that there’s plenty of books by him I’ve still to read: two dozen Sharpe novels (1981-2025); the Grail Quest quartet (2000-2012), which sounds Arthurian but actually takes place during the Hundred Years’ War; 13 instalments of the Saxon Stories (2004-2020), set in ninth-and-tenth-century England; and four instalments of the Starbuck series (1993-96), set during the American Civil War. Yes, there’s enough Cornwell goodness out there to keep me reading for a long time to come.

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

March 10, 2025

Bernard Cornwell’s (still the) King

© Penguin Books

A while ago on this blog, I enthusiastically reviewed Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995), the first volume of his Warlord Chronicles. These books are his take on the King Arthur legend, which he tells in a manner closer to the reality of the Dark Ages than most other interpretations of the legend. As a gift last Christmas, my partner kindly bought me the second and third volumes of the Warlord Chronicles, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997). Here are my thoughts on Enemy of God, which I’ve recently finished reading.

Enemy of God’s framing device is the same as The Winter King’s. In the sixth century, an elderly monk called Derfel is writing down the history of King Arthur at the behest of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the Arthurian tales she’s heard. As a young man Derfel knew Arthur and became one of his most trusted warriors. A theme in the books is the tension between messy reality and fanciful legend. Derfel’s version of events frequently disappoints Igraine, accustomed to hearing much more romanticised stories about the king. At one point she tells him, “There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you!” Derfel fatalistically assumes that Igraine, later, will doctor his writings and make them more compatible with the legend.

The Winter King ended with Arthur triumphing at the Battle of Lugg Vale, a contest brought about by his own foolishness in backing out of an arranged marriage to Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, which massively offended her father, and wedding instead the more alluring but also more calculating Guinevere. Enemy of God continues Arthur and Derfel’s story by detailing three more major events in their lives.

Firstly, Derfel takes part in Merlin’s ongoing quest to retrieve some relics that according to legend were given to the ancient Britons by the old pagan Gods, are known as the ‘Treasures of Britain’ and will, Merlin believes, restore Britain to the golden age it supposedly enjoyed before the arrivals of the Romans and, more lately, the Saxons. Specifically, they go hunting for a magical cauldron that’s hidden on the island of Ynys Mon (today the Welsh island of Anglesey) off the coast of the kingdom of Lleyn, controlled by the vicious Irish king Diwrnach. Secondly, Arthur marshals the warriors of most of the Briton kingdoms and sets off to dislodge the most powerful Saxon king, Aelle, from the east of the island – a campaign that eventually brings him to Saxon-controlled London. And lastly, Arthur finds himself facing a rebellion in his home kingdom of Dummonia. The rebels have incited the Christian community to rise against the pagan one there, with Arthur unjustly portrayed as the oppressive, Christian-hating pagan-in-chief, i.e., the ‘Enemy of God’ of the title.

Along the way, Derfel finds happiness with Ceinwyn, the woman Arthur spurned in the previous book, and they start a family together. He also makes a troubling discovery about who his father is. Arthur, meanwhile, learns some hard truths about certain people close to him whom he’s loved or, at least, been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to. That Mordred, the boy-king of Dummonia, for whom Arthur has been acting as the kingdom’s lord-protector until the lad reaches manhood, turns out to be a wrong ’un is the least of the book’s surprises.

From wikimedia.org

A couple of things make Enemy of God feel different from its predecessor. Firstly, Christianity is portrayed much more negatively here. In The Winter King, the Christian Britons co-existed peacefully alongside the pagan ones, and the Briton kings had priests as well as druids in their entourages, ensuring them the support of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gods. This harmoniousness was embodied in the character of the affable and loyal Bishop Bedwin, but Enemy of God bumps him off early on. Thereafter, the only sympathetic Christian character is Sir Galahad, who’s so decent and broad-minded he even lends Merlin a hand in his quest for the pagan cauldron.

Amusingly, Cornwell portrays the Christians’ activities, wailing in tongues, flagellating themselves and generally behaving hysterically as the year 500 AD draw nears – likely, they believe, to be the year when their Saviour returns to the earth – as immensely disturbing to the pagans. They react to the Christians’ shenanigans with as much distaste and fear as modern bourgeoisie Christians have reacted to the many loopy religious cults that have sprung up during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

A second difference is that we get far more of Merlin in this book. In The Winter King, he didn’t show up until page 282, more than halfway through. I was slightly critical of how he was deployed in the previous book’s plot. I wrote that “…the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, ‘Duh-dah!’” This didn’t sit very comfortably with the book’s attempts to treat the Arthurian legend with non-fantastical seriousness.

Merlin’s still something of an issue In Enemy of God, though here it’s to do with how he manages to suddenly revitalise himself. At different points he seems to be at death’s door, or to have lapsed into senile decrepitude, but then he stages startling comebacks. He’s like Doctor Who regenerating when his old body is about to die though, unlike the TV Time Lord, Merlin doesn’t actually transform into someone new.

Still, Cornwell’s Merlin is an immensely engaging character and he gets the best lines. While telling Derfel what a lion is, and describing one he once saw in Rome, he remarks: “It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing. I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet. Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians?” When he goes on to talk about a crocodile, and Derfel inquires what that is, he explains, “A thing like Lancelot.”

It’s more difficult to breathe life into the character of Arthur. There’s a danger that his very worthiness will make him seem two-dimensional and dull. However, Cornwell mostly avoids this trap by highlighting the character-flaws that spring from this worthiness: naivete, gullibility and – paradoxically – being so in thrall to his sense of duty that he becomes villainous. This last thing is illustrated when Cornwell weaves the tragic, chivalric romance of Tristan and Iseult into his narrative. Here, the loving but doomed couple incur the wrath of King Mark of Kernow and Arthur feels duty-bound to side with Mark, even though Tristan has helped him in earlier campaigns. When this ends horribly, Derfel is so disgusted with Arthur that he shuns him for a long time afterwards.

© Cartwright Hall Art Gallery / Bradford Museums & Galleries

It’s surprising to read a book written almost 30 years ago, and set roughly 1500 years ago, and find elements in it reminding me of 2025. But Enemy of God does this in different ways. Living in an era of Trumpian fake news, often transmitted by social media, I found myself smiling ruefully at Derfel’s accounts of how the weaselly Lancelot propagates a false image of himself, one brave and virtuous, by getting the bards to sing songs in praise of him around the countryside. And after Derfel falls out with Arthur, he goes to those bards and pays for “a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls. I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.”

Also pushing fake news are the Christians. At one point, a Christian magistrate called Nabur is executed for treason: “These days, of course, he is called a saint and martyr, but I only remember Nabur as a smooth, corrupt liar.” Later, Arthur has to fight off an ambush in a squalid Christian settlement in the mountains of Powys, led by a filthy, wild-haired fanatic called Bishop Cadoc. This also gets the Dark Ages equivalent of being reported on Elon Musk’s X: “They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasures to steal – but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it…” Obviously, “Cadoc was elevated into a living saint…”

It’s also interesting to view Enemy of God through the prism of 2025’s Britain, when Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is rallying its supporters with chants of “We want our country back.” Although Merlin is a very appealing character overall, it’s not difficult to see parallels between his mission to restore the old pre-Roman Britain and the nostalgic British nationalism peddled by Farage. Ceinwyn, who’s quite enamoured with Merlin, gives a startlingly Farage-like speech at one point: “When I was a child… I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy. There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace. I want that Britain back, Derfel.”

On the other hand, Arthur evokes a more forward-looking – dare I say inclusive? – Britain. Early in the book, he rejects Merlin’s vision of the island, saying: “This isn’t the old Britain… Maybe once we were a people of one blood, but now? The Romans brought men from every corner of the world! Sarmatians, Libyans, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks! Their blood is mingled with ours, just as it seethes with Roman blood and mixes now with Saxon blood. We are what we are, Derfel, not what we once were…” Arthur might be the greatest hero of British legend, but Farage’s Reform Party wouldn’t want to cite Cornwell’s version of him in their campaign literature.

In nearly every respect, Enemy of God is as good as its predecessor. The only area where I think it pales a little in comparison to The Winter King is its ending. Whereas the first volume ended with the bang that was the Battle of Lugg Vale, this volume is slightly anti-climactic. Cornwell was presumably more concerned with manoeuvring his characters into position for the third and final volume than with finishing the second instalment with a bang similar to the first’s. This is, to be fair, a problem that has beset many a middle volume in many a trilogy. However, with everything else about Enemy of God so captivating and entertaining, I’m happy to overlook that slight shortcoming.

And so, in the near-future, I’ll hopefully get to grips with Excalibur…

© Michael Joseph / St Martin’s Press

July 29, 2024February 10, 2025

Bernard Cornwell’s (the) king

© Martin Joseph

My reading has waxed and waned this year. Until March, I lived in an apartment that required a 40-minute ride on a single bus to, and from, my workplace every day. That meant each working day I’d spend more than an hour sitting on a bus with my nose stuck in a book. As a result, I read a lot – six books in January 2024 alone, for instance.

However, one house-move and change-of-address later, I now find myself travelling to work on one bus for ten minutes, and then either on another bus for 15 minutes or on Singapore’s MRT system for five minutes. And suddenly, my reading has been knocked for six. I’ve barely got my latest book out and started perusing its pages when it’s time to change bus or change transport-mode. Since then, in the past few months, the books I’ve managed to finish have numbered a measly half-dozen.

However, one book I’ve read lately has bucked that trend. It’s a book that, from the moment I started it, I couldn’t put it down. This didn’t just happen while I was in transit to and from work. I was sneaking reads of it at my desk in the office. I was also reading it at home, much to the disgust of my always attention-hungry cat. It’s been a long time indeed since a book has taken over my life this way.

The book was The Winter King (1995), the first volume in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy, his retelling of the legend of King Arthur.

It’s the first Arthurian novel I’ve read in a while. The last one was Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant (though I suppose it’s better described as a ‘post-Arthurian’ novel), which I read early in the days of the Covid-19 pandemic. A couple of years before that, I read T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, which consisted of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, the first book was turned into an underwhelming animated movie by Walt Disney in 1963, but the literary series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on.

From what I’d heard about the Warlord trilogy, The Winter King was going to be a very different proposition. The word people have used again and again in relation to Cornwall’s books is ‘realism’. Thus, I shouldn’t expect Merlin to tutor Arthur by turning him into a fish, hawk, goose, ant, whatever, as he did in the T. H. White books. No, I expected The Winter King to drip with grim, dark, bloody and muddy veracity, painting as authentic as a picture as is possible (1500 years on) of life in fifth-century Britain, after the Romans had departed and when the Britons found their way of life under threat from invading Saxons. And all the fanciful embellishments that, over the centuries and millennia, have been added to King Arthur’s legend would be shorn from the story.

© Martin Joseph

That was what I expected and in many ways it’s what I got. But the fanciful stuff isn’t banished altogether. Cornwell’s premise is that Arthur’s story is being written down after his death by an elderly man called Derfel. At the book’s start, Derfel is a Christian monk but, as a young man, he was both a pagan and one of Arthur’s most trusted warriors. He’s writing at the urging of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the – already exaggerated – tales of Arthur she’s heard. And while Derfel records the story, she badgers him about the enchanting bits he’s left out. What about Arthur, as a boy, pulling a sword out of a stone? No, Derfel patiently tells her, that never happened – though in a ceremony once, Merlin did sadistically make the young Arthur stand all night on top of a stone in the middle of Stonehenge, holding a heavy sword. And what of the gallant and romantic Sir Lancelot? Well, Derfel concedes, Lancelot did exist – but he was a complete c*nt.

Revelations like these obviously aren’t what Igraine wants to hear. You get the impression that, once Derfel’s completed manuscript is in her hands, she’ll have her own scribes alter it until the story is one she’s comfortable with. And so, Cornwell suggests, even when Arthur’s exploits were transcribed for the first time, revisionism was at work. As James Stewart’s newspaper-man declares in John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Cornwell’s treatment of magic and the supernatural is a little unexpected too. He doesn’t have Merlin performing magical feats in front of our faces, but in a way such things exist – supposedly at the behest of the druids and witches that lurk at the fringes of this primitive, violent society. They play a major role because, real or not, people believe in them. When, for example, Nimue – in traditional Arthurian mythology the main Lady of the Lake, but here a witch-girl who’s one of Merlin’s acolytes and with whom, throughout the story, Derfel has a strange, on-off love affair – constructs a ‘ghost-fence’ out of wooden posts and severed human heads along the flank of an army, it doesn’t matter if the fence possesses real magical powers or not. The fact is, the enemy soldiers are convinced it does and nothing will induce them to cross the thing. No wonder that when the novel’s various kings and warlords move their armies into battle, they’re usually accompanied by a gaggle of verminous druids who histrionically cast spells and curses at their foes.

Interestingly, though Christianity has taken hold in fifth-century Britain and has many converts, including some among the powerful, it’s generally regarded as a curious, sometimes incomprehensible counterpart to the druidic paganism that pre-dates it. As Cornwell writes in the book’s opening pages about Uther Pendragon, king of the land of Dumnonia, he “did accept that the Christian god probably had as much power as most other gods.” Accordingly, as king, he decides to play it safe and employs a few Christian priests in his service as well as a few old-school druids.

This is underlined early on when we see Pendragon, desperate for his pregnant daughter-in-law Norwenna to give birth to a healthy male heir, rely first of all on the priests of his Christian advisor Bishop Bedwin, “chanting their prayers in a chamber beside the hall where holy water had been sprinkled, a cross had been hung over the birth bed and another put beneath Norwenna’s body.” When the birth-process takes a turn for the worse, Pendragon orders the priests out and replaces them with a delegation from Ynys Wydryn – Merlin’s abode – led by the pagan priestess Morgan (a more-disturbing-than-usual version of Morgan le Fay).

“Sebile, Morgan’s slave, put a birch branch over the hall door and waved another over the writhing body of the hurting Princess. Nimue crouched in the door and urinated on the threshold to keep the evil fairies away from the hall, then she cupped some of her urine and carried it to Norwenna’s bed where she sprinkled it on the straw as a further precaution against the child’s soul being stolen away at the moment of birth. Morgan… slapped Norwenna’s hands away so she could force a charm of rare amber between the Princess’s breasts.” Meanwhile, on the ramparts outside, the pagans from Ynys Wydryn light multiple fires and create an unholy racket. “The guards beat their spear-shafts against their shields, and the priests piled more wood on a dozen blazing pyres while the rest of us screamed our noisy challenges against the evil wraiths that had slithered through the night to curse Norwenna’s labour.”

Incidentally, the baby that’s successfully delivered isn’t Arthur, but his nephew Mordred. Arthur is Pendragon’s bastard son and because of his illegitimacy is unable to inherit the crown of Dumnonia himself. He’s already an adult when Derfel begins his tale, is engaged overseas in Amorica – Brittany – and doesn’t make an appearance until about a hundred pages in, when he returns to Dumnonia to become the infant Mordred’s protector.

Also off-stage for much of the book is Merlin. He’s been on a quest to locate something called ‘the Knowledge of Britain’, and has been absent for so long it’s rumoured he might even be dead. In the meantime, life goes on at his base at Ynys Wydryn, a sort of demented, pagan hippy-commune supervised by Morgan and Nimue. There, Merlin, “for his pleasure… had assembled a tribe of maimed, disfigured, twisted and half-mad creatures…” One of its inhabitants is Derfel, who as a small child seemingly miraculously escaped a massacre carried out by the brutal King Gundleus, of the neighbouring land of Siluria. “The Tor was filled with such children who had been snatched from the Gods. Merlin believed we were special and that we might grow into a new order of Druids and Priestesses who could help him re-establish the old true religion in Rome-blighted Britain, but he never had time to teach us.” How Derfel ends up in his old age as a monk in a Christian monastery is presumably something the trilogy’s later books will explain.

Cornwell makes Merlin a memorable character, when he finally appears, and he’s responsible for much of the book’s humour. (Despite its realism, The Winter King is, in places, very amusing.) But Merlin is also, for me, one of the book’s few weaknesses. Specifically, the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely. A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day. He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, “Duh-dah!”

Anyway, that’s the set-up. After Pendragon’s death, Arthur becomes unofficial king of Dumnonia, keeping the throne warm for its official occupant, Mordred, who’s still an infant. Meanwhile, with the Saxons seizing large tracts of Britain’s east coast, Arthur knows he must try to build an alliance among the Britons’ kingdoms – Dumnonia, Gwent, Powys, Kernow and evil King Gundleus’s Siluria, i.e., what’s now modern-day Wales and western England – to fight the invaders off. That is no easy job given the rivalries and feuding that beset the leaders of those kingdoms. And Arthur ends up making the situation worse. He lets his heart rule his head and backs out of an arranged marriage designed to cement the necessary alliance – outraging everyone involved – after falling in love with a certain Guinevere. Of Guinevere, Merlin comments acidly, “it would have been better… had she been drowned at birth.”

Bernard Cornwell is, of course, best-known for his 24 novels about British soldier Richard Sharpe, set during the Napoleonic Wars. I haven’t read any of these – basically because for years I’ve been working my way through another lengthy series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin stories of Patrick O’Brian. Well, if the Sharpe books are as gripping and entertaining as The Winter King, I’ll certainly make a point of reading them eventually… But first I’m going to read the other two entries in the Warlord trilogy, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).

From facebook.com/bernard.cornwell

October 15, 2021October 16, 2021

Just a flesh wound

It’s fair to say that the regal, if probably hypothetical, legend of King Arthur has suffered more than a few flesh wounds from filmmakers over the years.

At least in the case of the Monty Python team, the filmmakers were deliberately taking the piss. Their 1974 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail inflicted on poor Arthur such indignities as the Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, the bloodthirsty Rabbit of Caerbannog, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Dennis of the Autonomous Collective (“Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”) and the outrageously rude French guard (“You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!”).

More worryingly, other filmmakers have tried to be serious, though with cringeworthy results. I’m thinking of 1967’s Camelot, which has Richard Harris’s Arthur bursting into song and warbling, “You mean a king who fought a dragon / Whacked him in two and fixed his wagon / Goes to be wed in terror and distress? / Yes!” Or 2004’s King Arthur, which has a grimly wooden Clive Owen in the title role and which, according to the Times’ reviewer Wendy Ide, ‘attaches itself to the Arthurian legend like some parasitic worm’. Or 2017’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, which was directed by Guy Ritchie in the manner you’d expect from Guy Ritchie, complete with a cameo appearance by that well-known icon of the Dark Ages, David Beckham.

Actually, I’ve immersed myself a lot in the King Arthur legend recently, not through films but through books, which I’ve found much more rewarding. Not long ago, I managed to finish off T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, comprised of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, I know, the first book was the basis for the underwhelming 1963 Walt Disney cartoon, but the series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on. I’ve also lately read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, set a short period after the death of Arthur. Come to think of it, The Buried Giant could almost qualify as a postscript to White’s series, although there are a few differences in continuity. (For example, Merlin is said to be dead by the time of Ishiguro’s novel, whereas in the timeline established by White he’d be alive. His ability in the Once and Future King books to live through time in the opposite direction from human beings, from the future to the past, would ensure that.)

A figure from Arthurian legend who plays a major role in The Buried Giant, as an elderly man, is Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain. Gawain, of course, occupies his own niche in the Arthurian mythos because he’s the main character in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the late 14^th century poem written in a North West Midlands dialect of Middle English. The poem has Sir Gawain respond to the mysterious Green Knight who arrives at Arthur’s court one Christmas Eve with an unusual challenge: who is prepared to strike him a blow with the axe he is carrying, on the condition that one year from now the Green Knight gets an opportunity to return the blow on his home turf, a place called the Green Chapel? Gawain takes up the challenge and uses the axe to whack off the Green Knight’s head. That, however, doesn’t resolve the matter, because the Green Knight refuses to die. He picks up his head and rides off, leaving Gawain honour-bound to keep the appointment at the Green Chapel next Christmas. Obviously, there, he’ll receive an equivalent blow that he’s less likely to be impervious to.

The poem was filmed twice in the 20^th century by the director Stephen Weeks, first in 1973 as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with singer Murray Head as Gawain and Nigel Greene as the Green Knight, and again in 1984 as Sword of the Valiant. Both versions made little impact and the clearly well-intentioned Weeks was hampered by low budgets. With the second version, he was no doubt hampered too by the fact he made the film for the notoriously schlocky Cannon Group, whose co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus overrode his choice of Mark Hamill to play Gawain and instead foisted on him Miles O’Keefe, who’d previous played the Lord of the Jungle in 1981’s dire Tarzan the Ape Man. A better casting choice was Sean Connery as the Green Knight.

Now, however, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has received the big budget treatment. Well, at 15 million dollars, not that big, but certainly a lot more than Stephen Weeks had to play with. David Lowery has written and directed a new version with Dev Patel, of 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, stepping into Gawain’s armour. I have to say the resulting film, with the shortened title The Green Knight, isn’t perfect, but nonetheless it does justice to the poem at last. It also qualifies as that rare beast – a quality King Arthur movie.

The Green Knight doesn’t present a fanciful or idealised picture of Arthur’s court, if that court had ever actually existed. While it doesn’t wallow in medieval dirt, muck and shit like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Dennis! There’s some lovely filth down here!”), it does show life in and around Arthur’s citadel as wintry, draughty, farmyard-y and unglamorous. Accordingly, Arthur and Guinevere (Sean Harris and Kate Dickie) are portrayed as an ageing, rather threadbare couple, who don’t even get the accolade of being referred to by their legendary names. They’re just ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’.

On the other hand, the film is keen to show how unspectacular characters, settings and events get exaggerated and mythologised and turned into legends. It makes much of story-telling and myth-making. For example, no sooner has Gawain had his first encounter with the Green Knight than the tale is being retold as a puppet show for the neighbourhood’s children. On a battlefield strewn with newly-dead corpses, a scavenger (Barry Keoghan) is already recounting stories of derring-do about the battle that are clearly over-the-top bullshit. And Arthur himself pleads with his court, “Friends, brothers and sisters, who can regale me and my queen with some myth or tale?” When he asks Gawain, “Tell me a tale of yourself so that I might know thee,” and Gawain replies, “I have none to tell,” Guinevere interjects with: “Yet. You have none to tell yet.”

It reminds me of another movie with a focus on myth-making, but a very different setting, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Ford’s meditation about the end of America’s Wild West. As Carleton Young’s newspaper-editor character says in that film, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”

I thought the first hour-and-a-bit of The Green Knight was splendid. The Green Knight himself is presented wonderfully as a proper green man, all gnarled wood and straggly tree-root beard, and his appearance is complemented by his voice, which is that of gravelly Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson. Actually, it’s nice to see Ineson and Kate Dickie together in a film again after they played the doomed Puritan parents in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Once Gawain sets off in search of the Green Chapel, to keep his unwanted appointment, he has several phantasmagorical adventures that involve phantoms, giants and supernaturally intelligent animals and that are gorgeously shot by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. However, it’s the episode with Barry Keoghan and his grubby little band of thieves that’s perhaps most haunting, thanks to an amazing sequence with a rotating camera-shot and time-lapse special effects that makes you wonder if anything else you see in the film is going to be true.

But The Green Knight does, in my opinion, have a structural problem. This is because in the original poem the adventures Gawain has during the first half of his journey are not described in any detail, and what we see on screen presumably comes from Lowery’s imagination. However, later events in the film are based on the poem and form an important part of the plot. These involve Gawain coming to a castle near the Green Chapel and enjoying the hospitality of its lord (Joel Edgerton) and lady (Alicia Vikander) during the last few days before his appointment. His experiences there become strange and prove to be a series of tests. That’s fine, but after the fantastical episodes that Gawain’s been through earlier on, these castle-bound scenes feel something of a let-down and act as a brake on the film’s momentum.

The climax bravely departs from the denouement of the poem (which had Arthur’s sister, and Gawain’s aunt, Morgan Le Fay popping up as a sort of medieval deus ex machina). Instead, it does something that had me thinking of the climax of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This neatly echoes the earlier themes of storytelling and myth-making.

The Green Knight certainly isn’t to everyone’s tastes. For example, a certain well-known science-fiction author, clearly more a Guy Richie / King Arthur: Legend of the Sword man, denounced it on twitter recently as “the worst film I’ve watched this year… What a waste of good actors. I want my two hours back.” However, if you’re in the right frame of mind, not expecting anything like the usual cinematic Arthurian fare, and willing to tolerate some ruminative, slow-moving stuff in the second half, you may find it magical.